Susan Kernohan

THE NEW DAYS DO NOT COME TRIPPINGLY

And the party debris. Women danced on tip-toe
dressed as disco balls dressed as helium balloons.
Your friends are leaving the continent.
Soft footfalls in the kitchen, up the walls of your heart;
winter sun shallow in a dishwater sky.
On Thursday, a sudden wedding.
What can it mean?
Tomorrow is perpetual, is always eventually a chasm.
Be fresh and huffy, get a haircut, live another year
dutifully trying not to be who you are.
The last person to ever listen to radio news
said to the last person ever to subscribe to a print newspaper,
We cannot concern ourselves with these eventual chasms.
Best to ask for what is small and repeatable, for problems
less than 180 pages long. Goodbye again, including yesterday.



Susan Kernohan works in a library in North York where she runs a writers' group for teens. Her writing has appeared in CV2, grain, The New Quarterly, Taddle Creek, This Magazine, Hardscrabble, and sub-Terrain. Susan lives in Toronto.